The library · The rites

Blessing of the room

the opening rite for any planetary, devotional or private practice that calls for a prepared space

What the tradition reads

Across the surviving grimoires, from the Key of Solomon through the Renaissance handbooks that followed it, an operation begins the same way almost without exception: the space is cleaned, then consecrated with water, salt and a flame, before anything else is attempted. The Key of Solomon's second book gives this instruction at length, prescribing a place cleansed and purified, perfumed with proper suffumigations, and sprinkled with water blessed for the purpose, on the reasoning, stated directly in the text, that a working asks for a kind of attention a cluttered or hurried space cannot properly offer. Salt has stood in Western practice for what is fixed and physical, water for what cleanses and carries, and an unlit flame for an intention not yet begun, associations far older than any single grimoire's claim on them. Later ceremonial revivals kept the same order of operations even where they dropped the older grimoire's more elaborate instructions for consecrated knives, robes and parchment, on the understanding that everything else in a planetary or devotional practice, the hour, the colour, the incense, the mantra, is furniture built around this one required step. The tradition is consistent on the point that skipping the furniture leaves a practice intact, while skipping the opening leaves it, by the tradition's own reckoning, not properly begun at all.

The story

The Key of Solomon survives in manuscripts mostly from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, though the text is pseudepigraphical, presenting itself as King Solomon's own record of his dealings with the intelligences that answer to the planets while almost certainly written many centuries after any historical Solomon, most likely compiled in Italian or Latin in the medieval or early Renaissance period and later copied in Greek, Hebrew and French besides. Its second book turns from the invocations of the first to the practical discipline the operator must undergo, purification, correct clothing, the construction of tools, and, central to the instructions gathered here, the proper preparation of the place itself: a chapter on suitable locations, another on the formation of the working circle, another on consecrated water and hyssop, and another on light and fire, each detailing a piece of the same larger act of readying a space before anything is asked of it. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's own Three Books of Occult Philosophy, compiled in the following century, kept the same underlying logic even while organising its material differently, and the ceremonial societies that revived grimoire practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries preserved the order of operations again, translating salt and water into whatever their own era found plain and available. What survived every retelling was not any one grimoire's wording but the sequence itself: clean, then bless, then begin.

The practice

1. Clean the space by hand, or clean one corner of it if that is all there is, opening a window if one is available. 2. Set a small bowl of clean water with a pinch of salt in it on a table or the floor, next to a lamp or candle left unlit for now. 3. Take three slow breaths, then say, aloud or silently, a blessing addressed to the One who made the lights, asking that the place be clean, quiet and kept, and that whatever is done here afterward harm no one. 4. Put the salt fully into the water, dip two fingers in, and touch the water to the four corners of the room, or the four sides of the table if the room is too large to reach, naming the place clean, quiet, kept and blessed at each corner in turn. 5. Light the lamp last, and say that what follows will be done in the light. 6. Carry out whatever practice the room has been prepared for. 7. When finished, put the lamp out with the fingers or a cap rather than a breath, and say a plain word of thanks before leaving the space.

Written from

• Key of Solomon, Book II (esotericarchives.com)
• Wikipedia, Key of Solomon

Corpus key rite:blessing-of-the-room.